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I am . . . MathGrrl!

Okay, so some people have cooler secret identities.

Genesis

Before I begin the story of MathGrrl, I must confess a dirty little
secret. At least three or four times a week, while enjoying my
morning coffee, I peruse the headlines at Uncommon Descent, Bill
Dembski's Intelligent Design Creationism blog.
My ostensible reasons are to keep an eye out for flare ups like those
that led to
Kitzmiller v. Dover, but often I just get a chuckle from the
inane antics of the regulars there.

Back in September of 2010 I made the mistake of actually reading
an article by Sal Cordova. Sal's attempt to take advantage of a
tragedy to make political hay was pathetic, but still evil enough to
inspire me to reply.

Having already experienced the heavy handed moderation at Uncommon
Descent, I knew that any pseudonym that made a point of disagreeing
with the UD regulars was likely to be banned on one pretext or another
in short order. Out of curiosity, I decided to create a female
persona to see if the primarily right wing, religiously conservative,
male population of the UD inner circle would be less threatened by a
woman.

MathGrrl was born.

Early Threads

MathGrrl made it through her first few months on UD by keeping her
head down after the initial challenge to Sal Cordova and focusing only
on technical questions, particularly around genetic algorithms. Her
participation increased for a time when gpuccio commented on
yet another thread about Dawkins' Weasel.
(of which I've written enough here and
here). This led to a long and
interesting discussion that ultimately ended up on
Mark Frank's blog.

This was the first significant discussion that MathGrrl was involved
in about Dembski's concept of
Complex Specified Information
(CSI). Unfortunately, gpuccio bowed out of the discussion just
when it looked like we might be getting to the point of actually being
able to calculate it.

CSI reared its head again on UD
in February of this year. CSI is an essential concept to
Intelligent Design Creationists. IDC proponents claim that CSI is a
unique indicator of the involvement of intelligent agency. MathGrrl
tried her best in that thread to get a rigorous mathematical
definition of the concept and some example calculations. My hope at
the time was that I would get sufficient details to be able to
calculate it and show that genetic algorithms and other evolutionary
simulations could easily generate CSI.

It was not to be. That thread was the first that demonstrated how
even IDC proponents couldn't agree on a definition and how no one,
including Dembski, had ever actually calculated CSI for a real world
biological system. Naturally, that didn't stop those same proponents
from continuing to repeat their claims.

Comments on that thread were closed before any definitions or
calculations were provided.

Where Angels Fear To Tread

Somewhat frustrated, I Googled the author
of the original post, chased down an email address for him, and asked
if he would create a new thread for that topic:

Jonathan,

I hope one of these email addresses still works. I've been participating on a thread that you started at UD:

Comments have been closed there, but the discussion itself still has legs, in my opinion. One particularly interesting post was #283 from vjtorley. He calculated the CSI generated by a gene duplication event, using Dembski's description in "Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence" and concluded that known evolutionary mechanisms can, in fact, generate CSI.

Following up on that, CJYman agreed. Other ID proponents did not.

Given the level of controversy, I would like to suggest that the topic deserves its own thread on UD. My interest in this is that, as I said on that thread, I would like to understand how to calculate CSI in enough detail that I can test the ID claim that it is a reliable metric for identifying intelligent agency.

It seems to me that a thread dedicated to examples of how to compute CSI for both real world biological systems and digital simulations would be a useful resource for UD. I hope you will consider creating it.

Thank you,

MathGrrl

Jonathan quickly replied:

Hello, Math Grrl!

Thanks for your email. I will see what I have time for, but the topic is really getting outside of my area of expertise. I am a biologist; not a mathematician (I suspect, going by your screen name, that this is more your field than mine).

Would you like me to forward the details of your request to Bill Dembski and see if he is interested in corresponding with you?

How did you acquire my email address, by the way?

Thanks again!

J

MathGrrl . . . um, I mean I responded that I'd be delighted if
he would raise the issue with Dembski. I was looking forward to
getting an answer right from the horse's mouth.

Going To The Show

Instead of a post by Dembski, I received an email from Denyse O'Leary:

Friend Jonathan M told me of your interest in CSI, and the list managers were wondering if you would like to put up a guest author post to ask your questions.

If you would like that, let me know and I will promote you to author for the purpose. I believe I can do it by checking a box.

My recommendation would be about 800 words; of course, if you need more, fine. But you may get the best results in comments at that length.

I look forward to hearing from you.

cheers,

Denyse O'Leary

MathGrrl was going to the show!

Like secret identities, some shows are cooler than others.

Her Finest Hour

CSI is one of the very few concepts of Intelligent Design Creationism
that is potentially testable. It was first described by Dembski in
The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small
Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and further
expanded upon in No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be
Purchased without Intelligence (Rowan & Littlefield, 2001) and
Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence.
Dembski states that "By contrast, to employ specified complexity to
infer design is to take the view that objects, even if nothing is
known about how they arose, can exhibit features that reliably signal
the action of an intelligent cause." This is truly a bold claim.

The problem for Dembski and the other Intelligent Design Creationists
is that "bold" is not equivalent to "true" or even to "coherent". By
April 9th there were 437 comments, but no mathematically rigorous
definition of CSI, as described by Dembski, nor any example
calculations for the four scenarios I described.

To be fair, vjtorley (of whom more later) had
previously attempted
to interpret Dembski's prose and calculate CSI for a gene
duplication event. He came to the conclusion that known evolutionary
mechanisms could, in fact, generate CSI. In a later thread he rather
transparently attempted to modify his calculation to avoid this
embarrassing result and ultimately resorted to attempting to explain
why it is
unreasonable to expect to be able to calculate CSI at all.

If MathGrrl accomplished anything at Uncommon Descent, this was it.
The comments following her guest post clearly demonstrate that no IDC
proponent at UD is capable of even defining CSI mathematically, let
alone calculating it for any real world system. Even more amusing is
the fact that those proponents couldn't even agree among themselves
about the concept.

Writing on blogs is almost exactly like shooting down enemy bombers.

Two results of that discussion bemuse me the most. The first is that,
despite not being able to define or calculate their metric, the IDC
proponents continue to insist that it is a clear and unique indicator
of intelligent agency. The second is that, again despite never
addressing the questions raised by MathGrrl in the original post,
several IDCists repeatedly claimed to have done so. When asked for
links to the answers they claimed to have produced, these IDCists
either referred to comments that didn't actually contain such answers
or simply resorted to insulting those requesting the links.

This thread is more than sufficient evidence that CSI is as
scientifically vacuous as the rest of Intelligent Design Creationism
and that its proponents are either profoundly intellectually dishonest
or grossly deluded by their religious beliefs.

It's interesting to note that, while Dembski was active on UD during
these discussions, he very carefully avoided any thread that was
discussing CSI. One might think it odd that he would ignore both
email from JonathanM and the considerable activity on his blog. Well,
if one were unaware of how
he ran away from the Dover trial, that is.

Revelations

MathGrrl's demise began with poor security hygiene on my part. It was
a sloppy mistake. I document it here in the hope it will save the
life of even one innocent pseudonym.

Throughout the MathGrrl saga, Mark Frank has generously created
threads on
his blog
to continue discussions that, for whatever reason, had stopped on
Uncommon Descent. I had a browser window open there and posted a
couple of messages as MathGrrl. Unfortunately, I had previously been
on another WordPress site, logged in under my real name. I didn't
notice that the commenter name had changed until I saw my messages.
Mark very kindly removed them as soon as he was able, but the damage
was done.

Nearly a month to the day after my error, vjtorley
guessed my name
in a post on Uncommon Descent. I hope for his sake that helps
re-establish his bona fides with his tribe after that embarrassing
"Hmm, looks like natural processes can create CSI!" lapse.

Lessons Learned

While I created the MathGrrl pseudonym to test my hypothesis that
female participants would be less likely to run afoul of Uncommon
Descent's moderators, what I didn't expect was for the female persona
to affect how I wrote. In fact, I believe it did. I modeled
MathGrrl's responses on how I've seen women I respect deal with
obnoxious men and male dominated environments (any mistakes I made in
that regard reflect my cluelessness, not theirs). If nothing else,
asking myself "How would MathGrrl respond?" made me pause before
replying. That, in turn, gave me enough perspective to laugh at and
ignore much of the baiting and explicit insults from the "gentlemen"
of Uncommon Descent.

In addition to trying to write in a more feminine style as less
of an aggressive dick, I found myself creating a backstory for
MathGrrl. She needed to be able to single-mindedly focus on the
questions she wanted answered, so I thought of her as a science and
math geek. I needed breaks from the discussion for work reasons, so I
made MathGrrl a student with exams and homework demands. Just to
tweak the noses of the fundamentalists on UD, I made her a meditating
worshipper of the divine feminine. The more details I filled in, the
easier it was to drop into character and find MathGrrl's voice.

This was going to be a picture of me getting in touch with my
feminine side,but the animal testing showed that was a bad
idea.

I have followed the Intelligent Design Creationism movement since
before the Dover trial, so I was well aware that IDCists lack a
scientific hypothesis or any evidence for their claims and that IDCism
makes no testable predictions. What I was surprised to learn was just
how little IDCists know or care about the actual practice of science
and how willing they are to out and out lie in defense of their
position.

These two characteristics were clearly and unambiguously demonstrated
during the CSI discussion. A scientist or mathematician would simply
not make claims like "CSI is a unique identifier of intelligent
agency" without carefully defining his or her terms and providing
detailed calculations to support the statement. The IDCists on
Uncommon Descent not only make such baseless assertions routinely,
they seem shocked that anyone would actually ask them to show their
work. Several even suggested that asking for a mathematically
rigorous definition was a mere rhetorical tactic. MathGrrl was never
able to get them to understand that, in the absence of a rigorous
definition, their claims were quite literally nonsensical.

When pressed to support their claims, MathGrrl's interlocutors threw
up a thick smokescreen of acronyms, links to videos, uncited
quotations, insults, tangential topics, references to unrelated
research, and spurious equations, none of which actually provided a
mathematical definition of CSI as described by Dembski nor detailed
example calculations. At one point an interesting tipping point was
reached where, instead of dumping more red herrings into the thread,
the IDCists started to claim to have already answered MathGrrl's
questions. When pressed, none could provide a link to where this
was done. When pressed even harder, comments that were clearly not
responsive were referenced, even after their lack of applicability was
pointed out. Despite the objective, easily verifiable facts, the
claim took on a life of its own.

Richard Dawkins
famously said
of anyone who didn't accept modern evolutionary theory "that person is
ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider
that)." There is scientific ignorance aplenty among the IDCists and
more than enough delusional thinking that may or may not approach
insanity. I'm afraid I'm not as charitable as Dr. Dawkins; I must
conclude, based on MathGrrl's experience, that some of the IDCists at
Uncommon Descent have been provided with more than enough information
to know better and are simply intellectually dishonest.

Public Apologies

As mentioned above,
Mark Frank has been
very generous to MathGrrl on his blog, throughout her tenure at
Uncommon Descent. He even removed the two posts made solely due to my
mistake, at my request. I shouldn't have asked him to do that. Mark,
I apologize publicly for asking you to help preserve MathGrrl's
pseudonymity. I should have simply raised my hand and admitted my
mistake then. I also apologize if I misled you in any way by my
actions.

I extend that second apology to Seversky, Flint, Rose, Zachriel,
Reciprocating Bill, Petrushka, Toronto, Alan Fox, and any other
members of the reality-based community who feel that my choice to use
the MathGrrl persona was in any way disrespectful to them.

Finally, I apologize to the people who sent MathGrrl notes confessing
their deep affection, invitations for dates, and proposals of marriage.
You know how to make a girl feel good, in a "I'm glad I'm not real"
kind of way.

I was raised to be polite, which forces me to consider apologizing to
the denizens of Uncommon Descent. However, with the exception of
Mrs. O'Leary, who was unfailingly charming in our email exchanges, and
Atom, who had not been involved in the discussions but chose to
publicly distance himself from vjtorley's actions, there isn't a
person there I'd be interested in even having a beer with. Given
that, I have to ask myself, to whom should I apologize? Those who
claim to be practicing science but refuse to support their claims?
Those who continue to lie in the face of clear evidence of their
mendacity? Those who quote mine and try to defend their dishonesty?
Those who support pseudonymity "for me but not for thee"? Those who
are trying so desperately to misappropriate the respect earned by
science for their own undeserving religious beliefs? Those who are
all too ready to clutch their pearls at some imagined etiquette
transgression while hypocritically behaving unbelievably rudely
themselves? Those who arrogantly mock what they clearly don't
understand? Those willing to censor their opponents rather than
address their arguments? Those misogynists who ignore arguments,
replying instead "Go away, little girl"? Those who remain willfully
ignorant despite the myriad educational resources available to them?
Those who deliberately build an insular community to support these
behaviors?

No, these people do not deserve an apology. While most supporters of
Intelligent Design Creationism are simply parroting what they hear
while sitting in their pews, the IDC proponents at Uncommon Descent
have chosen to actively proselytize. Despite the disingenuous ways in
which they engage with people knowledgeable about science, they can't
help but be exposed to the deep flaws in their own arguments. They
cannot claim ignorance. That leaves stupidity, insanity, or
wickedness. I find that the evidence supports a combination of all
three.

The Intelligent Design Creationists are attempting to destroy science
education in this country. They must, and will, be prevented from
doing so.

Into The Sunset

Being MathGrrl was interesting and parts of the experience were
educational, but I'm putting away my virtual makeup and costumes,
quite probably for good. If I'm going to invest that much effort in
creating a character in the future, I'll write some fiction.

You didn't think MathGrrl would ride a horse, did you?

I'm also done posting on Uncommon Descent. Participating in a forum
as heavily and arbitrarily moderated as UD is amusing when the goal is
to see if misogyny can be turned against itself, but ultimately it
grants moral sanction to an offensively unethical practice. While the
owners of UD certainly have the right to ban people, or
moderate them into oblivion, simply for disagreeing with Intelligent
Design Creationism, actually doing so demonstrates a deep character
flaw. Free speech is important, and you either support it or you
don't. The Uncommon Descent owners don't.

There is also an optimistic reason why I'll no longer post on UD:
They're irrelevant. Uncommon Descent is the only forum where anyone
even pretends that Intelligent Design Creationism is remotely
scientific. Everyone else, including the supporters in the pews,
realizes that it's just the latest incarnation of creationism tarted
up in an attempt to get past that pesky separation of church and
state. Even at UD, the costume lab coat is wearing thin, with the
religious biases of the IDCists clearly on display. We definitely
need to be vigilant to prevent religion from being taught in science
classes, but if no IDC opponents posted at UD for a few weeks, it
would quickly wither from lack of anything to discuss.

Instead, I'll be lurking at
After the Bar Closes, the discussion group of
The Panda's Thumb dedicated to
mocking Uncommon Descent. Everyone deserves some initial courtesy,
but when it becomes clear that they are not interested in evidence or
logic the only appropriate response to cranks is to point and laugh.
The Intelligent Design Creationists of Uncommon Descent have earned
that response.

If any Uncommon Descent regular thinks that he or she can answer the
questions MathGrrl raised in her guest post, or can make any other
positive, scientific argument for Intelligent Design
Creationism, I will be happy to engage in a discussion in a neutral,
unmoderated venue. I suggest the
talk.origins Usenet newsgroup which I read somewhat
infrequently. Drop me an
email and I'll meet
you there. Just to give you fair warning, though, I'm nowhere near as
nice as MathGrrl.